Ross Perot, Tom Steyer: The Rich Man As Avenging Angel

Ross Perot has just left us. Tom Steyer has just entered the fray.

They are cut from the same cloth: the rich man as avenging angel, out to fix our politics because someone has to do it, by golly. This place, Washington, is just too screwed up. It's too corrupt. Or it's too wishy-washy. Or it's standing still.

Didn't John F. Kennedy want to "get America moving again" in 1960? Yup. Bankrolled by his dad, Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. Millions and millions.

Same deal. That one worked, barely. Can you buy your way into the White House? You can say that 45 also did, barely.

In the end, the searchlight of politics finds you. You can't control everything. That much you learn almost right away. The only thing you can control is your own messaging. Even then, you need help and someone messes up. You have to cover for them and fire them if the damage makes things sufficiently uncomfortable. But you're used to that. You're fired. You do it or someone else does.

Ross Perot had the cute phrases ready: If you see a snake, just kill it. Don't appoint a committee on snakes....We need deeds, not words, in this city....

But this one, too, which became ultimately ironic: Most people give up when they're just about to achieve success. They give up on the one-yard line.

It's exactly what he did. He was running neck-and-neck with the nominees of the two major parties in 1992: an incumbent president, George H.W. Bush, and Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton. Unquestionably, he was going to take at least six states in the Electoral College. It was starting to look as if while he wouldn't win the presidency, he might hold the cards in a House of Representatives run-off.

Then he quit. Momentarily, but he did quit. He got mad at the media for mis-reporting something about a wedding that he thought no one should stick their noses into, but he had been in denial. Gary Hart could have told him that, having been bounced from the '88 campaign by press coverage of personal behavior.

Perot got angry with what he saw as Republican "dirty trick" efforts to create, well, conjured photographs of his daughter's wedding. Fed up with it all and ornery at the press from the start, he backed away. He jumped back in, but the momentum was lost. Too many had returned to the mainstream. Evangelicals were still behind him, but as of then were under-organized.

As it was, he carried 19 percent of the popular vote--enough to lose every state, but also enough (as later analysis proved) to deny Bush a second term, because far more Republicans voted for Perot's third party movement than Democrats.

But all that money didn't thicken his skin against real or imagined attacks. He was blunt like 45 and his view of the world was all his own, like 45's--simple, fresh in their own way, and politically naive. But he had also performed charitable and brave works in places like Vietnam and Iran, so his heart was not in a bad place, like 45's is.

There was no Twitter, no Facebook, no surge of social media in 1992, though. There you go: He was ahead of his time.

Is Tom Steyer ahead of his time, too? Or behind?

In any event, his announcement of his candidacy for president, online today, suggests that he believes that only he can bring the country where it needs to be--first and foremost, getting rid of 45. It has to be his sole focus, since he's been trying to lead a national movement to impeach the president that's about two years old now. He's a believer in social justice, had already created his own interest group called NextGen Climate, and sufficiently liberal so the Dems won't see him as an outlier. He can't be called someone who rushes in to take advantage of a situation, either, since with his entry, it renews as 24 the number of candidates in the race.

So what's behind this? It can only be that during the first debate, not nearly enough of the 20 candidates who made it to the stage discussed, or brought into the discussion, the point of it all as Steyer sees it: We can't do a thing with this clownish crook in the White House. They didn't say so nearly often enough, so he will. He's a billionaire like Perot was, too, so he'll have plenty of self-created opportunities.

He's obviously forgotten, or discounted, that the MSNBC hosts didn't ask any of the candidates this question because they didn't think it should be asked right now, amazingly: Why are you running against him? Tell us in two minutes, please. But nearly all the candidates responded to exactly what they were asked, which were policy-based questions. They were very nice to answer exactly those questions that were asked. Some jumped the shark by interrupting others' answers, but very few, like Jay Inslee, Bernie Sanders and Marianne Williamson, used a question to insert an attack on 45. In a sense, the hosts committed the cardinal sin of journalism: They buried the lead.

That doesn't mean that no debate host will ever get around to asking such a question. Undoubtedly, that's being discussed right now. But Tom Steyer wants to make very, very sure where Democratic attention should be--and that maybe he'll be the one to whom people will turn to get it done.

He has no legislative experience; neither did 45, he could say. His odds appear to be quite long; so were 45's, he could say. What makes him think he can overcome all these seasoned politicians; 45 had a whole bunch against him four years ago, too, he could say.

TV ads? Old hat by now. You've seen them: Sincere, specific, speaking to what so many of us already know--this is a breathing, throbbing disaster that must be intercepted now. As impeachment has predictably stalled due to Democratic divides, time grinds on and it looks as if the next election will get in the way. This, too, may be a casualty of anxiety and impatience, since chairpersons Cummings, Nadler and Schiff are still busy accumulating information that could be utilized as evidence against 45 if Speaker Pelosi gives the nod; it's just slow. Nonetheless, you'll see more ads from him.

Meanwhile, House Republicans are sharpening their knives to stab Robert Mueller when he testifies in eight days in an all-out attempt to make it meaningless. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead! Steyer could be saying.

He wants to skip over the meat grinder of campaigning and get to the point. Lots of others have, too. Sorry. Can't do it. You can simplify the message, but you can't simplify the process. You might even skip the debates, but it's still more than half a year to Iowa.

Maybe Tom Steyer will become the 2020 campaign's Ross Perot. Maybe he will split the opposition (again) and hand the election to the one person people can't imagine would win again. Maybe the Russians won't be needed this time.

That, too, is a possible legacy of this new, rich, avenging angel. Never has the devil been more evident, it says elsewhere (paraphrasing), than when he appears to be an angel of light.

Crazier things have happened. Too bad Ross Perot isn't around any longer to say so.

Be well. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark